Russia and China will set up a joint commission to develop the Northern Sea Route (NSR).
Russia’s general director of the Rosatom State Corporation, Alexey Likhachev, made the announcement on Channel One, Russian News Agency reported.
"The news is that a decision has been made to create a joint commission for the development of the Northern Sea Route. On the Russian side, this is the activity of Rosatom. On the Chinese side, it will be headed by the minister of transport of the People’s Republic of China," Likhachev said.
The Northern Sea Route is a shipping route in the Russian Arctic that runs along Russia's northern shores in seas of the Arctic Ocean (the Barents, Kara, Laptev, East Siberian, Chukchi and Bering Seas). It connects the Russian Federation's European and Far Eastern ports as well as the mouths of navigable Siberian rivers into a single transport system.
Likhachev said the area of responsibility of the future commission included not only Chinese transit along the NSR.
"Our task is to create in the shortest possible time a joint programme for expanding Chinese transit along the Northern Sea Route, as well as for a number of other projects in the interests of using this global artery, which, of course, has enormous development potential," he said.
NSR's length from the Kara Gate Strait to Providence Bay is 5 600 kilometres. More than 50 ports are on the route. NSR is almost twice shorter than other sea routes from Europe to the Far East.
In 1991, the Northern Sea Route was opened to international shipping. In 2013, a federal law fixed the NSR borders. In 2018, the Rosatom State Corporation received the authority to develop the Northern Sea Route.
